I Can't Praise "Hail, Caesar!", But I Can't Quite Bury It, Either.

Friday night at the movies finds the wife and me going to see Hail, Caesar!, the latest offering from the Coen Brothers.  I’m not one of those who worship at the altar of Joel and Ethan Coen, but I’ve enjoyed more of their works than not, and the marketing for this one was funny enough to evoke thoughts of Raising Arizona, so I was really looking forward to this one.  It’s apparent that Hail, Caesar! is intended to be something of a “love letter” to Old Hollywood, and in that respect, the Brothers have pulled it off.  Sadly, they didn’t succeed at much of anything else.

Their screenplay gives us Eddie Mannix (played by Batman-jawed Josh Brolin), who in reality was an executive at MGM through the forties and fifties, working as a “fixer,” addressing the scandals that followed their stars around and doing his best to maintain the facade of wholesome people making wholesome entertainment for the Eisenhower generation. Oh, how times have changed… This fictional Eddie marches all around production at the fictional Capitol Studios, starting every day in confession (where the priest even tells him he comes entirely too often), trying to stay morally upright in a morally bankrupt industry.  He then deals with drunken starlets, snippy gossip columnists, a demanding-but-never-seen studio boss, and a pregnant-out-of-wedlock actress in one morning.  The afternoon brings news that the star (George Clooney) of the studio’s big swords-and-sandals prestige production has been kidnapped by communist screenwriters (it IS the early fifties, after all) seeking bigger cuts of the monies their writings produce.

The movie follows enough disparate plotlines to allow the opportunity to revisit several different film styles of the early fifties, and the Coens pull off all of them. Gene Autry-style Westerns, Esther Williams-style swimming spectacles and black-tie teacup dramas all have homage paid to them with sly wit.  The work done by their production designer Jess Gonchor, costume designer Mary Zophres and legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins is outstanding, totally convincing me this world actually was Hollywood in its heyday of the 1950s. The myriad of quirky characters all represent some genre that studios of the day cranked out in their assembly-line fashion, and the witty dialogue they speak are entertaining in their own way, but the downside is that it seems their focus on recreating this world and being faithful to it kept them from crafting a more gripping story.

Just one example is the impressive Anchors Aweigh-type dance number mid-way through the film, which plays as perfectly as if Stanley Donen were staging it for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.  Channing Tatum taps and jumps and glides and sings throughout the number, proving he might very well have been a bigger star back in that day than he is today, but once the number is over, it’s over, and serves no other purpose in propelling the story… or what little story there is.  

The Coens seem to have come up with a series of bits and matched all of them up perfectly with the members of their “repertory company,” but aside from Clooney, and perhaps Alden Ehrenreich as the cowboy actor Hobie Doyle, all of these names you see listed above the title on the movie poster are mere cameos.  Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill and Frances McDormand all have a mere one scene each, and none of the three seem to do anything that relates to the underlying plot line of the Clooney character’s kidnapping.

Sadly, this movie is also yet another victim in the trend of movie marketing giving us all the funny bits as a means of drawing us is, but not leaving any for us to discover once we’re in the theater.  A sequence showing exasperated director Laurence Lorentz’s (Ralph Fiennes) attempts at getting a dense actor to deliver a line properly was featured in the film’s second trailer, and while the painful coaching the director gives is hilarious, it’s also probably the highlight of the movie’s laughs. Lots of other one-liners fall flat, as do pretty much all of George Clooney’s myriad of Elmer Fudd-like facial expressions.

The tone, the mood, the visuals were all spot-on, but I kept waiting for the story to get deeper.  It never did. Okay, the Coens want us to get the joke when they name the Carmen Miranda-type character Carlotta Valdez, and fans of Hitchcock probably will, but is that sort of thing enough to build a movie’s plot around? Hail, Caesar! is a great idea for a movie, and even a great starting point for a movie, but not one that became a great movie.  A “meh” one, perhaps, but after such works as Inside Llewyn Davis, O Brother Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men, we expect better from the Coens, or at least something more engaging.

No one should try to defy "Gravity"

As wonderful a genre as science fiction is, 99.9% of movies made under that label lean a lot more heavily on the “fiction” part than the “science,” so it’s a rare treat when we get one that relies on some scientific fact-based scenarios to produce dramatic effect.  When pitching 2001: A Space Odyssey to MGM all those years ago, Stanley Kubrick said he wanted to produce the first “good” science-fiction film, with his definition of “good” being “believable,” as he wanted to tell a compelling story in a setting that could easily be our own world. Of course, he very famously did so, and the lack of similar efforts by other filmmakers through the years could be evidence of how difficult a task “realistic” science fiction is.

Alfonso Cauron’s Gravity, however, belongs in any discussion with Kubrick’s master-piece.  By saying such a thing, I don’t mean to imply that they are equals (2001 is such a unique film that almost anything will pale in comparison to it), but I do mean that Gravity is such an absolute technical marvel, like 2001, that its being a very good human story is like icing on the proverbial cake.

The film opens with an uninterrupted seventeen-minute take depicting a space shuttle repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.  Astronauts Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are two members of the crew we see performing extra-vehicular activity (that’s space-walking to you and me) when NASA radios an emergency abort alert, as a field of debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is in a direct orbital path with their shuttle.  This cloud of metallic fragments travelling faster than any bullet ever could does indeed find them before they are able to change their orbital path, destroying the spacecraft and leaving Kowalski and Stone adrift in space.  What follows is an engrossing, fascinating story of loss, bravery and the discovery of a will to survive, told by Cauron in such a stunningly beautiful way that any audience member not feeling fear and anxiety, and happiness and joy, is almost certainly a fairly dark-hearted individual.  

By the end of the first act, Gravity essentially becomes a one-woman show, a story of a woman’s decision to survive, not only her current predicament, but her lonely, emotionally empty life in general.  Sandra Bullock’s performance is a statement that her Oscar win two years ago was no fluke, and I fully expect to see her name listed amongst the Best Actress nominees again come February. There are so many scenes in which she is the only character, and yet even without anyone to exchange dialogue, she conveys so much about Stone’s fear, and pain, and depression, that we know this character intimately by the time the film ends, and her fate is all the more emotionally impactful for it.

As amazing a story as Gravity is, the concept of a massive storm of orbital space debris could be the impetus for several other fascinating stories, as we could imagine how our society would react to a severe crippling of, if not outright elimination of, global telecom-munications that would result from such a scenario.  Imagine television and radio broad-casts being interrupted, international telephone calls being impossible, and internet connec-tivity being all but stopped.  Hell, the loss of world-wide Twitter access alone might be the beginning of Armageddon.  Cauron, to his credit, does not distract us from the story he chooses to tell, not even once, trusting his audience to understand how there’s a wave of chaos going on down on Earth, which makes the solitude of Bullock’s character all that much more profound.

At the risk of being repetitive, I’ll reiterate that Gravity is worth the price of admission as a visual treat alone.  Cauron’s use of computer-generated effects is extensive, but done with such great skill that not once are we under the misguided notion that we’re viewing some sci-fi space opera. Cauron’s lighting and camera movement constantly amazed me, and the moments of suspense and danger the astronauts faced got physical reactions from me that most movies can’t get out of me anymore.  Even the sound design of the film was fantastic, as we heard the radio transmissions from Earth differently when we were inside the astronauts’ helmets than we did when we were outside their suits (yes, you read that right - Cauron takes us all sorts of places in this film), and the silence of space is punctu-ated by the thuds and clunks that would be heard when the characters were in enclosed spaces with atmosphere.  

Now I did see Gravity in IMAX 3D, and yes, I’ve just raved and raved about how beautiful it was to watch, but I continue to believe this format to be a waste of a filmgoer’s money, and a lesser viewing experience than traditional two-dimensional film presentation.  With the ex-ception of Avatar, I’m yet to see a 3D film that didn’t have muddied or unbalanced colors, and I would even include Avatar when maintaining that the 3D effects have not yet added anything absolutely necessary to a story being told on-screen.  That being said, to each his own, and your tastes and experiences may differ, but I don’t think there’s really any debate needed when saying Gravity is the best picture of 2013 so far.

"The Thin Red Line..." Oh, I saw red, all right...

Working on cleaning off my DVR last night, I re-watched Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line.  I remember it being Oscar-bait on its initial release in 1998, but I didn't make it to the theater to see it.  Finally catching up to it on DVD a few years later, it really left a bad taste in my mouth.  However, never let it be said that I can't remain open to the possibility that I should re-evaluate something, so I decided to give it another chance and see if I'd missed something somehow.  No dice, folks - my opinion hasn't changed

Why must filmmakers of the last thirty-five years paint the fighting soldier, particularly the American fighting soldier, using a angst-filled, vile, butchering brush?  Did the home front experience of the Vietnam War so scar these men that now make movies about those who actually went over there and did the fighting?  The depictions of the armed conflicts of the last decade that “Hollywood” presents us demonstrates their attitudes haven’t changed, either.  The argument as to whether the Vietnam War or the War on Terror are Just wars is for another time and place, but in attempting to broaden that argument to cover all war in general, Malick has committed something akin to blasphemy in The Thin Red Line.  By choosing to move such metaphysical musings to the heads of the soldiers fighting the World War II battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific, he has distorted history, insulted veterans and completely misrepresented the values and beliefs of the American GI’s who fought that crucial battle.

Malick doesn’t deserve all the blame, I suppose, as this film is based on James Jones’ somewhat autobiographical novel from the early 1960s, a time when all of the free-love, no-man-is-right-over-another philosophy was beginning to gel amongst the intelligentsia of the world’s youth.  The book may be fantastic, but I can’t say as I haven’t had the pleasure of reading it.  Whatever the quality of the source material, it seems that Malick has taken it and made a complete and utter mess of it.  Sure, this film was his celebrated return to filmmaking after a twenty-year absence, and it received a Best Picture Oscar nomination, most likely just due to the awe in which Academy voters hold Malick.  But this wasn’t worth the wait.

The plot (such as it is) follows four men, I think, as they struggle with finding meaning in the carnage of the Pacific War against the Japanese.  I say that I think it was four men because two of them, played by Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin, look so remarkably alike that at times I couldn’t tell them apart.  Hell, I challenge a viewer to learn their names without resorting to the Internet Movie DataBase.  One (Caviezel) plays the part of the Conscientious Objector, a chronic deserter who, after being picked up by the Army while living amongst island natives, is assigned to stretcher-bearer duty at the film’s outset.  By the end of the film, Malick shows the character’s selfishness to be misplaced, but for certainly less-than-patriotic reasons.  Another (Chaplin) is the one who was taken away from his young bride, and lives only to return to her.  Again, Malick shows us the foolishness of such devotion by the film’s end.

The other two are thankfully a bit more discernible from one another.  Sean Penn is a company sergeant who makes it his mission to show Caviezel’s character the error of his ways, but by film’s end, he finds more sympathy with the deserter than he would’ve imagined possible.  Lastly is the battalion colonel (Nick Nolte), who drives his men relentlessly to take a well-defended Japanese position, one that his underlings believe impossible to take.  While Malick shows the Colonel to be right, we’re to understand that it is more for the colonel’s fear of missing out on his share of military glory than for the higher cause of victory, because he flat-out tells his subordinates so!  How ridiculous a notion.

Other characters drift in and out of our vision, played by A-list stars like Woody Harrelson and John Travolta and John Savage, mumbling about vines consuming trees and soldiers being like children to their Captain-fathers, none of whom ever make any mark with us save as examples of the Hell of War.  Their voice-overs almost overlap, allowing us to eavesdrop on their confusion, their fear and their cowardice, but the weight of their musings is all but lost because it’s all but impossible to determine just which one of them is speaking at any given moment.

The film is so without a logical structure that I suppose it’s possible Malick himself didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say.  I understand that his original cut of the film clocked in at something like five hours, which Fox simply would not allow, so hacking out two hours of story may account for some of the incompleteness I felt from the dangling plotlines and underdeveloped characters (I think poor Adrien Brody has but one spoken line, despite his face popping up in it throughout the final two-thirds of the film - shoot, even the film's title is never explained).  He worked on this material so long that he might have simply drifted away from the novel’s original intent.  I doubt this, though.  Say what you want about the politics of filmmakers, their skill is rarely debatable, and filmmakers of Malick’s caliber put on the screen exactly what they intend.  It’s just so puzzling and disappointing that what he intended here was such a slap in the face to so noble a struggle.

The imagery of this movie is breathtaking.  Don’t let it be said that I didn’t acknowledge that.  Malick has not lost his visual touch during his extended vacation, but he has obviously not advanced beyond his mid-70s thinking.  Whatever things the Vietnam War may have been, World War II was almost none of them.  That war was a just war, and the soldiers fighting it knew it.  American men were lining up in droves to volunteer to go and crush an evil power that had attacked us and swore to destroy us, and only a microscopic few had any problems with self-doubt or introspection about “why nature must contend with itself” or finding the “evil inherent in all men” that the wretched souls in this film have.  Of course, I’m aware of the post-traumatic problems that some of the combatants suffered in the post-war years, but I shudder to think of what my veteran grandfather, God rest his soul, who froze his butt off during the Battle of the Bulge and marched across Remagen Bridge and into the German heartland, would’ve said about this bunch of pansies.